"Etching: Rembrandt's Legacy" and Potentially Symbolic Objects were conjoined exhibitions first developed by and for the SACC, (Singleton Arts and Cultural Centre) NSW, Australia in 2023. The two exhibitions were then mounted in 2024 (19 Jan. 1 March) in Newcastle at Watt Space. Although there were significant differences in the layout at Watt Space, with one exception, the works were the same.
Watt Space is in Northumberland House Cnr King and Auckland Streets Newcastle NSW 2300, Australia and is the city adjunct to the main University Art Museum on the Campus at Callaghan
Etching has always had an alluring, although slightly problematic, reputation. It could be said that etching has always had the reputation that saxophone playing had in the early Jazz-age in the twentieth century. Something to steer your children away from. For artists, the challenge is associated with the high-risk, high-return or demanding nature of the medium, yet paradoxically it remains one of the few non-commercial printmaking mediums known to the general public as a signifier of an original print distinctive from a print as a reproduction of a painting. This exhibition aims to evoke, as much as explicitly explain, the mystique surrounding etching as a primary inventive image-making medium, examining its enduring appeal.
The significance of etching in Rembrandt’s career has been recognized in recent times, as evidenced by the major exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in the second half of 2023. Titled “Rembrandt: True to Life,” that exhibition presented over 100 of his etchings, emphasizing the importance of printmaking as a central aspect of his creative thinking. This revelation, though new to some, has long been acknowledged among printmakers. In fact, William M. Ivins, a renowned twentieth-century authority, once proclaimed Rembrandt as “the patron saint of non-commercial etchers,” a significant tribute given that it was made seventy years ago in less secular times.
This exhibition Etching: Rembrandt’s Legacy brought together selected Rembrandt etchings and prints by his contemporaries to demonstrate the nature of his innovative contributions to the art of etching as an independent medium. Alongside Rembrandt’s works, the exhibition also showcases later historical examples by esteemed master printmakers such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Francisco de Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, and Max Beckmann. These works collectively illuminate the enduring attraction of etching for artists and collectors from Rembrandt’s time to the present day.
A comprehensive analysis of the development of etching in Europe and more widely is presented in the catalogue produced by SACC for the exhibition and available for purchase at SACC or as a PDF on Research Gate: Etching: Rembrandt’s Legacy
Watt Space Gallery One
Gallery One long-wall featuring Piranesi, Rembrandt, Kollwitz, Klinger, Rembrandt, Rubens.
Gallery One end wall featuring Rembrandt, Callot, Frisius, Rembrandt x 2, Collaert, Raimondi after Durer
This exhibition of domestic objects was the contemporary etching element appended to a larger exhibition titled Etching: Rembrandt’s Legacy displayed in the Main Gallery at the Singleton Arts + Cultural Centre (September 9 2023 - November 19 2023) As the installation shots below reveal, the copper plates that generated each print were also displayed in the exhibition.
The following views also give some indication of how the different venues allowed different dialogues between the contemporary etched objects and the use of symbolic objects in the historical etchings.
Watt Space Gallery 2 copper etching plates and framed etchings with aquatint
The subject of each of these plates is what can be described as a domestic object, that in the first instance, has personal significance and therefore will be familiar to anyone in the western world who lived through the nineteen sixties and seventies. For such an audience, mutual nostalgia and memories are therefore embedded in most of these images but the ambition here is to prompt the bigger contemporary question as to what degree human emotional life gravitates around objects. These prints in the SACC show are a distance from traditional still-life images, since they give focus to one object as singular point of interest, using the compositional mode of the prolific selfie but not the means. Each image is drawn to dominate the frame of the plate by constructional manipulation of a central viewing point as with classic Renaissance perspective rules rather than the 360 degree or fish-eye warping associated with a camera lense. The accompanying exhibition Etching: Rembrandt’s Legacy features a number of etchings from the past where the symbolic potential for objects was exploited in representing, the Elements, Human Senses, Hours of the Day, Occupations and so on. To create a direct dialogue with these works, examples of etchings by Piranesi and Lepautre are included in the same space of the Potentially Symbolic Objects installation. These works depict fanciful or fantastic objects created by these artists in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively.
The Watt Space layout allowed the contemporary domestic objects to be visually linked with the historical etchings across two discrete gallery spaces Gallery 2 and 3 where the connecting wall acting as a physical visual transition as shown in the following shots of the linking wall, Gallery 3, and Gallery 2 respectively
Copyright © Ross Woodrow - All rights reserved - 2023 - 2024.